Box buys technology to let admins keep better track of content

Cloud storage vendor Box has acquired the technology behind a company called dLoop, which it will use to add more controls that give enterprises more features for protecting their content.

Enterprises have become increasingly interested in storage services offered by the likes Box, Citrix Systems, Dropbox, Egnyte and EMC, which lets users store and share content online. Enterprise interest has been a boon for the vendors, but has also put more demands on especially security and management.

Box’s ability to protect and manage content is already one of its strong points, according to a recent review in Infoworld, which rated Box as better for enterprise users than a number of other online storage services.

With the addition of dLoop’s technology, the company wants to add more features to help set it apart from the competition. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but dLoop co-founder Divya Jain has joined Box.

Her job will be to lead Box’s content analysis and data classification efforts, Box said in a blog post.

To put in place rules that decide what users can do with content, IT staff first have to find the content, and this is where dLoop’s technology comes in. It uses machine-learning to help discover documents that are normally unreachable by search or pattern matching solutions, according to Box. Once it has integrated the dLoop technology, Box will automatically be able to find the content most relevant to enterprise administrators, the company said.

Exactly how this will manifest itself remains to be seen, but the first new features based on the acquisition will be announced shortly, it said.